


guilt and other sins

by leoandsnake



Series: outlaws [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Belligerent Sexual Tension, Hand Jobs, M/M, Outercourse, Resentment, Rough Sex, a little bit of hurt/comfort, brotherly anger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:01:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23790496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: Sometimes Arthur thought Dutch suspected them. If they couldn’t stop bickering he would send them off “to fish”, and he never commented on it when they came back with only one or two fish and their clothes askew. He knew the signs of a brewing eruption: the two of them circling each other like horses in heat, the distant sound of Arthur shouting “Marston!” in frustration, John walking around camp with a knife like he was going to slice Arthur up if Arthur gave him a reason to do so.
Relationships: John Marston/Arthur Morgan
Series: outlaws [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725295
Comments: 6
Kudos: 101





	guilt and other sins

**Author's Note:**

> quarantine has me finally playing rdr2. this is set after pouring forth oil, in a version where the 4 camp together afterwards instead of splitting up right away

After Charles runs off to bed like a coward, Arthur can only take about twenty minutes of Sean’s nonstop horror stories about life in Ireland before he gets abruptly to his feet in the middle of one, accidentally kicking an empty tin of beans into their campfire.

Sean looks up at him. “You goin’ to sleep, Arthur? Though you weren’t tired.”

“Uh,” Arthur says. There’s an empty cup of coffee by his foot, and he’s still full of adrenaline from the train job, so that’s a lie he doesn’t really think he can get away with. “Gotta talk to John.”

Sean makes a face at him, as anyone who knows Arthur would in response to this. Shit. Why didn’t he say Charles? He thinks Charles did actually go to sleep, is the problem, so unless he wants to climb in his tent and snuggle up beside him, there’s nothing doing.

“About another job,” Arthur clarifies.

“Oh!” Sean looks excited. “Alright then. I’ll be up a while longer, let me know what you two work out.”

Arthur makes a general noise in response to this and strides off through the grass to John’s tent. A lantern burning inside is making the cloth walls glow.

Arthur squats at the flap and says, “Hey. John.”

“What?” John says, sounding irritated, like he thinks Arthur is about to give him shit.

“Can I come in?”

John’s quiet for a moment; that quiet is heavy with ten years of history. Hell, maybe eleven, now. Arthur can’t exactly remember how old they were when it first happened. They were young, he knows that for sure. They were camping in the mountains with Dutch on a night very unlike this one, one with fog so thick you couldn’t see the stars, could hardly see your hand in front of your face.

The two of them started fighting, first with words and then with fists. John was always smaller, especially then, so he was curled over himself on the ground as Arthur rained blows on him by the time Hosea intervened. Arthur had a fleeting desire to kick John to death, and he didn’t even understand why. There was always something about John that got his hackles up.

Sometime that night Arthur went to his tent to apologize. John sat on the floor staring at him as he entered, as hateful as a cat. Arthur offered him a bottle of liquor, and they got to talking, as they sometimes do. Arthur doesn’t quite remember what happened next, or maybe he chooses not to, but he woke up with a splitting headache, a sleeping, shirtless John in his arms, and his hand down John’s pants, wrapped around his prick.

Things like that happened a few more times, usually when they got so angry at each other they couldn’t stand it. Sometimes Arthur thought Dutch suspected them; if they couldn’t stop bickering he would send them off “to fish”, and he never commented on it when they came back with only one or two fish and their clothes askew. He knew the signs of a brewing eruption: the two of them circling each other like horses in heat, the distant sound of Arthur shouting “Marston!” in frustration, John walking around camp with a knife like he was going to slice Arthur up if Arthur gave him a reason to do so. And all they ever needed to do to fix it was get their hands on each other’s peckers.

Arthur is wary again, now, because nothing’s happened between them since before John ran off, and he’d like to keep it that way. He’s been extra mean ever since John got back, keeping him at arm’s length, trying to push him toward Abigail and Jack. He barely even cares anymore that John is Dutch’s golden child. With the wisdom of age, Arthur’s starting to see how Dutch always used competition to manipulate his boys, and anyway John has all but fallen out of Dutch’s good graces. The first blow was when he ran away, and the second when he got his face ate by wolves and became a liability to the gang right when Dutch needed them all at their best.

All that aside, when John says, “Sure,” Arthur goes and joins him in his tent. He’s not much worried. What’s going to happen, with Sean right outside?

Arthur is so lost in thought about all this that when he settles with his back against the wall of the tent, stretching his legs out, and John eyes him and asks, “So what do you need?” he can’t remember what to say.

“Oh,” Arthur grunts, and rubs at his nose. John is perched on a crate, cleaning his gun, so he says, “Can you spare some oil? I’m out.”

John hands him the pipette of gun oil that’s lying on the ground next to his foot, along with a rag. Arthur takes these wordlessly and starts to clean his pistol.

“You sticking around?” John says.

“What, in general?”

“No, in my tent.”

“Oh, well,” Arthur says, getting a little warm under his collar. “Don’t want to go back out there to Sean.”

John nods in understanding.

“Told him I came in here to talk to you about another score.”

“You got another score?”

“Naw.”

John laughs. The sound is nice to hear. He drops his head again, his brow furrowed as he carefully works a blackened rag over his rifle. The lantern light flickers on his face, barely illuminating him, making his eyes dark like coal.

After a while of Arthur staring at him, John looks up.

To cover, Arthur says, “How’re those scars healing?”

John shrugs. “I think this is as good as it’s gonna get. Hosea gave me this cream he made out of herbs to put on them, but I don’t know how well it works, and it don’t smell too good, neither.”

“You got it with you?”

“In my bag.”

Arthur leans over and starts digging through John’s belongings.

“It’s that tin,” John says after a moment. “The tobacco tin. He put it in there.”

Arthur opens it and peers inside. John’s right, it doesn’t smell too good. Smells like a horse poultice.

“You know, Hosea’s usually right about most everything,” he says. “And you should get that scar better if you can. We’re trying to blend in, not scare folk.”

John rolls his eyes. “We’re not trying to blend in, _Dutch_ is trying to blend in. Dutch has delusions.”

Arthur’s surprised to hear him talk like this, but he doesn’t show it. He tries to hand John the tin, and John shakes his head like a stubborn horse.

“C’mere,” Arthur says, sitting up and moving closer to him without thinking about it, like they’re the brothers they mostly are. “Let me take a look at you, at least.”

John tries to brush him off with a flick of his hand, but Arthur takes John’s face in his hand and tilts it into the light, and John doesn’t fight him.

“When’d the stitches come out?” Arthur says.

“Few days back,” John says.

Arthur tries not to look at his mouth, which is soft and inviting. He runs a thumb over the longest gash and clucks his tongue. “Stupid,” he says.

“Knock it off, Arthur,” John says. “Could’ve happened to anybody.”

“Wouldn’t happen to me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Arthur dips his finger into the cream and starts rubbing it on the ugliest part of the scar. “Might could happen to Bill, though.”

John laughs again. “Christ, that shit stinks...”

“I know. Does it feel good?”

“Yeah, actually. The scars get itchy.”

“I figured.”

John’s quiet for a moment, looking at Arthur. “This is the most tender you’ve touched me since I don’t know when,” he says.

Arthur’s breath catches, and he heaves a sigh. “Oh, I dunno. When I carried you off that mountain, maybe.”

“Was that tender?”

“I didn’t chuck your carcass over my shoulders like a sheep, and I could’ve, and it woulda made you easier to carry. I’d call that tender enough.”

“Tender by Van der Linde gang standards,” John murmurs.

“Right.”

“I don’t like how fast the law found us tonight.”

Arthur puts more cream on John’s face and rubs it in, his movements more brisk now. “I told you those Pinkertons caught me half a mile from camp.”

“I know. I think they set us up.”

“How?”

“I think they clocked Mary-Beth and fed her that tip. They know you, they know me, they know Dutch. Why wouldn’t they know who runs with us?”

“Then why don’t they just come get us?”

“Arthur, they _told_ you why,” John says. “They want to turn us on each other. They want one of us to come quietly, so they can catch and hang the rest.”

Arthur stops rubbing the cream into John’s scars and rests an elbow on John’s thigh, barely thinking about the fact that he’s doing so. “Right.”

John searches his face. “You should go get some sleep,” he says.

Arthur ignores this. “They’ll probably come after you, next.”

“The Pinkertons ain’t got shit on me.”

“Doesn’t matter none. They ain’t got nothing on me neither, no proof.”

“You think I’d flip,” John accuses.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Look, I’d worry about anybody,” Arthur says. “And you ran off on us. I don’t know what the hell you did for that year.”

John visibly bristles. The tension between them thickens.

“Get your elbow off me,” John says, his eyes glittering.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll move it for you.”

Arthur stares at John for a moment, then grabs him by the shoulders and knocks him sideways off the crate, pinning him down and straddling him. He can feel John’s waist between his thighs. “Try me.”

“Get the fuck off me,” John hisses, wriggling under him.

“What, you can’t push me off? Come on, Marston. One little wolf attack and now you’re weak as cat piss.”

“Damn you, Arthur...” John spits in his face, but he doesn’t get Arthur in the eye, so Arthur is unmoved by this.

“Quiet down,” Arthur says. “You’re gonna wake Charles.” He closes his hands around John’s wrists and pins them back against the floor of the tent, spread-eagling him. John stares up at him with dislike.

“What are you gonna do?” he says in a low voice. “Have your way with me?”

“Never forced nobody, you think I’d start with _you_? And anyway I don’t need to force you,” Arthur says. “Never have. Ain’t that right?”

“You’re a bully,” John accuses.

“When’d I bully you?”

“Always.” John takes advantage of Arthur’s momentary distraction and manages to wiggle a leg out from under him, then kicks him in the gut like a donkey.

Arthur groans and lets go of John, collapsing onto the bedroll to nurse the blinding pain in his kidney. He stares up at the ceiling of the tent, breathing hard through his nose.

“Come on, asshole,” he says, when he can speak again. “I was just playin’ with you. You never had no sense of humor. No sense of humor, sense of direction, or sense of propriety.”

“You sure like to tell everybody else what’s wrong with them, Arthur,” John says. “Fuck is wrong with _you?_ ”

“Nothing shooting my load couldn’t fix, I reckon,” Arthur says, more honestly than he means to.

John’s quiet for a moment. “That why you came in here?”

“I truly did come here to get away from Sean.” Arthur lolls his head over and looks hopefully at John, who’s taken a seat back down on the crate and is giving him a hawkish stare. “‘Less you got the same problem I do.”

John doesn’t answer, but Arthur can tell he does. Things have been tense with him and Abigail for ages, and he’s on strict orders from Dutch not to fuck around with anyone else, lest that contribute to the tension. Dutch hates any tension that wasn’t manufactured by his own hand.

“You c’mere now, boy,” Arthur says. “I’ll do you first, even, like a gentleman.”

John snorts at him and shoots him a look, but he clambers down onto the bedroll and collapses into Arthur’s arms. Their rough lips meet, pushing hard against each other’s teeth. In their mouths mingle the flavors of two different types of cigarettes.

“Thought we were done with this,” John rasps against his mouth once Arthur has dropped his hand and started massaging John’s hard-on through his pants.

“I say that?”

“You didn’t have to… you wouldn’t even look at me when I joined back up with you all.”

Arthur kisses him some more, because he doesn’t want to talk. The cream on John’s face rubs into Arthur’s beard, making both of them reek with a smell that’s somewhere between crabgrass and Sweet William flowers.

When they break apart for air, he murmurs into John’s neck, “I don’t much like disloyalty.”

“I know you don’t.” John strokes his hair. “Why’d you cut your hair so short?”

“Was getting in my eyes.”

“You don’t look like an outlaw. You look like a lawman.”

“Don’t you insult me like that.”

They smile at each other, and Arthur unzips John’s fly to get at his stiffy, then goes back to rubbing it, trying to ignore his own for the moment.

“That feels nice,” John murmurs.

“S’posed to.”

John bucks his hips into Arthur’s hand, and Arthur slides a jeaned thigh in between his legs, applying pressure to John’s balls while he strokes his prick with a rough hand.

“You didn’t have to stop kissing me just ‘cos I said you look like the law, Morgan,” John says.

Arthur laughs and leans in again. “It’s just you smell terrible,” he whispers in his ear.

“You smell worse, and you ain’t got no excuse for it,” John says, but it’s gentle ribbing. They kiss again, deeper, and John presses his tongue into Arthur’s mouth as he rubs hard against him. Arthur would never tell him this, not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, but John kisses just like a woman. He doesn’t know how Abigail stands it, but it suits him just fine.

Then again, Arthur has never kissed a man besides John. Maybe everyone kisses like that, himself included. He hopes not.

Mostly when they do this they like to hump each other like dogs, usually through their clothes, and usually they’re so pent-up that they both come right away and fall into a dreamless sleep, weak with relief. Tonight John comes fast as usual, with a soft sigh and moan, then goes still on the bedroll. Arthur sighs at the unpleasant sensation of spunk all over his hand and wipes it on his jeans.

“Roll over,” he says to John.

“We ain’t doing that,” John warns him.

“I didn’t say we were. I know you’d skin me if I tried. I know what you keep under your pillow, John Marston.”

John grins at him. It’s a big skinning knife that he sleeps with under his pillow, one meant for elk and wild boar. He rolls over and eases his jeans down off his ass; Arthur takes them the rest of the way, then hikes his shirt up for good measure. There are a few scars on his back, too, but they’re more faded than the ones on his face. Don’t see as much sun.

Despite John’s protestations, Arthur has never fucked him like he fucks women, they’ve never taken it that far. But he has done before what he’s about to do — gotten off by rubbing his johnson in the cleft of John’s ass. John actually seems to like being degraded by Arthur this way, or maybe Arthur is the one being degraded by this, and that’s what John likes.

Arthur slides his jeans and underwear down to his knees and lays over John, taking his prick in his hand and sticking it between the cheeks where the friction feels nice, then starts moving his hips. John is pliable under him, happy from coming, and Arthur idly plays with his hair as he crushes their bodies together so he can get as much friction on himself as possible.

“Quiet down,” John warns him, when he’s worked himself into a mild sweat and started breathing heavily.

“Right,” Arthur says, then coughs before he goes back to humping him, with more control over himself this time. He thought he heard Sean go to bed a few minutes ago, but they can never be too careful.

Despite all that, it feels comfortable, using John to get off like this. Being with a woman is complicated — Arthur doesn’t like to pay for it, and it’s a liability for the gang for him to walk around sweet-talking women into bed when those women could always decide to go through his things or start asking around about him. Besides, Arthur doesn’t want to have a kid again, not after what happened to Isaac. That part of his heart is so hard and gone that he doesn’t know if it could warm up again.

When Arthur comes it’s like a great unclenching of his soul, a bear trap springing open in his chest and freeing his mind for a moment. He shoots his load all over John, which John grunts pissily about, but Arthur is too happy to care. He rolls over onto his back, just breathing.

“I’m gonna go rinse off in the creek,” John mutters, getting to his feet and tugging up his drawers. “Before this dries. I’ll whistle if it’s safe for you to follow.”

Arthur nods at him, then blows out the lantern as John leaves. He sits there in the darkness listening to crickets and the gurgling of the creek for a minute or two before he hears John let out a soft, two-tone whistle.

He crawls out of the tent and sees that the campfire has been left to smolder, and the other three tents are dark. Arthur gets to his feet, brushing himself off and doing up his pants, then tracks John down about twenty feet away. He’s sitting pantsless with his bare ass in the creek, shivering, lit up by moonlight and starlight.

Arthur kneels at the creek bed and starts washing John’s spunk off of his hands. “Is it that bad?” He usually comes on John’s ass, or back, wherever’s convenient.

“If you leave it, it dries,” John says. “Makes riding uncomfortable.”

“Next time I’ll blow on your face. Maybe it'll help those scars."

“I _will_ skin you,” John threatens.

Arthur laughs. “C’mere,” he says, gesturing.

John gets up and runs a hand over his backside. He must be satisfied, because he comes over to Arthur and sits next to him, dangling his bare, dark-haired legs over the lip of the creek.

Arthur moves behind him somewhat and lifts his hair off the back of his neck, kissing him there, at the spot that always gets the sweatiest after a long day of riding and shooting and robbing. He runs his fingernails up John’s scalp, rubbing and scratching him tenderly.

“How come this is the only time you’re nice to me?” John says, his rasp barely above a whisper.

Arthur kisses the back of his neck again and takes a whiff of his hairline, inhaling the smell of dried sweat and dirt. “It ain’t.”

“Yeah it is.”

“I talk like that to everybody.”

“I get it worse.”

Arthur stops kissing him and shoves his head away, hard. John scrambles to his feet and shoves Arthur in the shoulder. “It ever occur to you, Martson, that I want more out of you than the rest of those fools? That I think you got more in you? The fuck am I going to ride Uncle or Bill about? They’re damn idiots. There’s no hope for them. You could be more than what you are, you know that? You come back here,” he adds, as John starts walking away.

“Knock it off,” John says, without much passion. He mostly sounds hurt and resigned.

“You could be a good father. You’re just feeling too sorry for yourself to be one. You think it’s not fair, ‘cos you never had one yourself. Life ain’t fair, John! When was life ever fair?”

“You got no room to talk,” John hisses, wheeling around. “Your boy —“

“My boy is dead,” Arthur bellows at him. “Shut your goddamn fool mouth about my son. I did right by him, always, and he’s dead.”

John straightens up. He looks ridiculous in just a shirt and underwear, no pants on.

“What?” he says. “Since when?”

“I’m not talking to you about this. Fuck yourself. Go back to bed.”

“Arthur — you mean this whole time you haven’t seen that boy, all of, what is it, ten years — he’s been _dead_?”

Physical pain throbs in Arthur’s chest like he took a bullet. “Go to bed, shit for brains,” he growls, turning back around to the creek and staring at the water. “Watch out for wolves.”

There’s silence behind him, and then the sound of retreating footsteps. Arthur squeezes his eyes shut and rubs at his forehead.

/

In the morning, Charles kicks the campfire out while the rest of them pack and load up the horses. They’re setting off early to avoid bounty hunters; the sun is barely peeking over the horizon, and the whole world is pink.

“That’s my lantern,” Arthur snaps at John.

John looks at the lantern he just hung on his horse. “You serious?”

“Yeah. It’s mine.”

“Then where’s mine?”

“Fuck if I know, but mine has a chip in the handle.”

“You can see a chip in the handle from twenty feet away, Morgan?”

Sean and Charles exchange a look.

“Arthur, we have plenty of lanterns back at camp,” Charles says, tightening the stirrups on his horse and patting its side.

“I don’t care. I just don’t want Marston taking my shit.”

Arthur’s looking at Charles when he says this, so he only sees the lantern fly at him in his peripheral vision, but he’s able to duck, anyway. It lands in the grass behind him.

He stares at John in disbelief. John shrugs at him and mounts his horse, heaving himself into the stirrups.

“Oh no you don’t,” Arthur says, striding over to him and trying to yank him off his horse. “You want to hit me, you come hit me, boy. Don’t you throw shit at me like a woman. I’ll have you shitting your own teeth.”

John kicks Arthur with the leg Arthur is pulling on, then starts raining blows on his head, smacking him and trying to scratch at his eyes. This is considerably painful, but Arthur keeps trying to drag him out of his stirrups, because his blood is up and Dutch isn’t here to tell them to knock it off.

“Boys!” Sean shouts, circling his horse impotently as he watches this. “Is it really time to cause a scene in a field, ey? When we’re hidin’ from the law?”

He doesn’t get off his horse, though, and the scuffling and guttural shouting of threatening epithets continues until Charles strides over and smacks John’s horse on the ass. The horse spooks with a great whinny and takes off, pulling John from Arthur’s grasp. John quickly reseats himself so he doesn’t fall off, shoots Arthur a withering look over his shoulder, then gallops away heading west toward camp.

Arthur exhales, his fury leaving him. Charles hands him a waterskin, and he takes a drink. His throat is raw from yelling.

“What’s the deal with you two?” Charles says in a quiet voice.

“I told you,” Arthur says.

“Yeah, but that clearly wasn’t all of it.”

Arthur shrugs. “Can’t explain,” he says. “Take too long. Fifteen years of shit, y’know.”

“Is this gonna be a problem?” Charles says.

“Nah. Never is when there’s work to be done.”

“They’ve always been like that, Charles,” Sean calls from horseback, shading his eyes with his hand. “Dutch plays ‘em off each other, like.”

Dumbass Sean. This is all his fault, anyhow. If Arthur hadn’t been trying to avoid him, he and John would have passed a normal night asleep in their individual tents, sexually frustrated but not sore from picking at a scabbed-over wound.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arthur snaps. “‘Always’. You been here all of ten minutes and you’re talking about ‘always’.”

“Been here longer’n Charles!”

“Barely,” Arthur says. “And I like Charles better.”

Charles laughs at this, and seems to decide to let the issue drop. He heads over to his horse, and Arthur does the same.

“Let’s split up on the way back,” Arthur says. He’s yearning to take the long way back to camp, maybe spend some time in the woods, writing in his journal and hunting rabbit. He’s in no hurry to see John or Dutch. “John went due west, so I’ll head northwest, you two split up going southwest. Alright?”

Charles and Sean both nod at him, and the three of them ride off into the morning.


End file.
